Literary News

Dzanc's new effort to expand our mission and bring the creative world to a national audience, DZANC DAY takes its cue from the popularity of our Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions. On March 20, 2010, Dzanc will run over 30 creative writing workshops in 25 cities across the country. These workshops will be held in cities from Portland, OR to Orlando, FL, from New Haven, CT to Los Angeles, CA and points between (including Nashville, Tn).

All monies raised from DZANC DAY will go toward supporting Dzanc's charitable programs which, in part, bring creative writing programs to students who could not otherwise afford the opportunity. Fantastic authors from across the country have volunteered their time, experience, and expertise to run these individual workshops. Each workshop will allow students to work face-to-face with the instructor in specific venues with each location focusing on a specific aspect of the writing world.

The DZANC DAY workshops serve not only to expand Dzanc's effort to bring inexpensive, face-to-face workshops to a wider audience, but, as noted, also to help us generate income that will allow Dzanc to continue that effort in our other charitable arenas - awarding the annual Dzanc Prize, running Dzanc Writer in Residence Programs in schools across the country, and more.

To browse available workshops and to sign up, click here.

Terence Hawkins (Keyhole issue 7 contributor) is celebrating the release of his first novel, The Rage of Achilles, released today by Casperian Books.

The Rage of Achilles is a dramatic new vision of the Trojan War, told with the immediacy and authenticity of a modern war memoir while maintaining the impressive scope of Homer's epic. Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children, has called The Rage of Achilles "...that rare thing--a genuinely fresh take on a classic text." More information is available at Terry's website www.terencehawkins.com, the publisher's website www.casperianbooks.com, and you can read the beginning of the novel here

YEAR OF THE LIQUIDATOR is proud to announce for our first title, the wonderfully bizarre One Hour of Television by Kristina Born

One Hour of Television is a bleeding, screaming, literary freak-beast adventure novel created by new Canadian voice-sensation Kristina Born. Told in poetic-micro-burst segments, Born transcribes a filthy world of wicked science, consumerism, bomb building, and Texas hold em. From a boiled pot of Gary Lutz, Andy Kaufman, and pure human fear, One Hour of Television is a story of mad consumption that will, through its paper, consume you.

http://yearoftheliquidator.com

Order Now

In this group of flash fiction and short stories Greg Gerke looks at the world with a sometimes absurd, sometimes tragic, but entirely compassionate eye. Two cars crash but the drivers turn out to be a cyclist who witnessed the accident, a son is visited by his dead father, a single Rainier cherry is used as a football in a scrimmage between potheads and in the hilarious title story a 1000-pound moth is nearing the end of his days.

Full of twists and turns, Greg Gerke’s debut collection is more powerful than fun; each character has flavor, the situations stick, the work is unique. There’s Something Wrong with Sven, but this book is right on.

—Kim Chinquee, Pushcart Winner and author of Oh Baby

With an ever-roving eye for the peculiar episodic at home and abroad, Greg Gerke lets plenty of little thrills bound out from these stories—though don’t look past the more tender moments in his carnivalesque travels. They are just as humorous as they are oddly endearing.

—Forrest Roth, author of Line and Pause

In There’s Something Wrong With Sven , Greg Gerke delivers dozens of short-shorts, each an absurdist world full of compassion and ambition, populated by surprisingly earnest characters who cannot help but enchant us as they pursue goals that are simultaneously fleeting and eternal. These stories contain big hearts and big laughter, as well as just enough of the sad and the weird to be both believable and memorable.

—Matt Bell, author of The Collectors and How the Broken Lead the Blind

Submissions Wanted for Buffalo ArtVoice, Buffalo's Village Voice. Flash fiction 500 or less. Posted in print and on-line.

send to avflashfiction@yahoo.com

Matt Bell's chapbook, The Collectors, is available for pre-order from Caketrain. It's $8, or you can buy it along with Tiny May Hall's All the Day's Sad Stories for $12.

The beginning of the The collectors can be read here (via Issuu), and another excerpt was previously published in Wigleaf as "How They Were Found and Who They Were That Found Them."

Blurbs for The Collectors
“‘Even a book can be a door,’ suggests the narrator of Matt Bell’s The Collectors.What you’ll find behind this particular door are two shaken and shaky brothers losing their tenuous grip on reality, slowly filling their house with decades of booby-trapped detritus and precious trash. The Collectors is a compelling portrait both of the way a heated mind can come to recreate the world and of how fascination with such a mind can end up being its own sort of trap. A wonderful, obsessive novella.”
--Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain and Last Days

“Matt Bell makes of the pathology of the miser, hoarder, or packrat an emblem of the obsessive life and makes his reader understand how the compulsion to collect may be only the mind’s seeking to construct for itself a refuge from an intolerable and otherwise inescapable reality. Bell’s fiction excites pity for those who live, as though walled up, in ruins of their own necessary construction. I admire The Collectors for the certainty of its prose and its unflinching observation of a most profound alienation—envying the first; fearing the second; and unhappily aware that artifice—no matter how splendid—is inadequate to ameliorate the despair.”
--Norman Lock, author of A History of the Imagination

"Matt Bell's lifesick pair, Langley and Homer, shell-shocked under a pile of newspapers, are disquieting, hilarious, and—in that strange way that makes Beckett's and Kafka's characters so urgent—entirely recognizable. Bell has written a beauty."
--Deb Olin Unferth, author of Vacation

Now announcing Brave Men Press, a new letterpress venture by EB Goodale. Brian Foley is the poetry editor.

First release will be a new letter pressed chapbook by poet Chris Tonelli (not pictured) called No Theater. Poems from No Theater can be currently seen in SIR!

Stay tuned for a forthcoming website with all release and contact info for Brave Men Press, including info on the chapbooks, broadsides, pamphlets, ads, valentines, & death threats we will be revealing.

[Source: http://eunuchsblues.blogspot.com/2009/03/brave-men-press.html]

Corey Mesler's new collection of stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (Brown Paper
Publishing, $14 paperback) is now available. To order a copy you
may do so by emailing the author directly (resolemcrey@yahoo.com), or calling Burke’s Books (901-278-7484) or off Amazon.com.

Listen is a collection of short fiction, continuing the exploration of
dialogue narrative begun in my novel, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue
(Livingston Press, 2002). Listen: 27 Short Conversations is based
around many modes of interaction and its characters include a wannabe
writer, a wannabe musician, the ghost of John Lennon, a talking TV,
Jesus Christ, King Arthur and a man who has been turned into a giant
hen.

“A virtuoso performance! Realism, monster stories, sex stories, love
stories, ghost stories, myths and legends, comedy both understated and
openly absurdist: in a literary atmosphere that fetishizes blandness
and sameness, such a broad range of ambition and accomplishment is a
brave and astonishing act. Pure fun from beginning to end.”
                                                --Pinckney Benedict, author of Dogs of God

Dzanc - is pleased to announce the opening of their newest inspiration:  the Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions.  

The DCWS is founded on the principle that many authors' lifestyles do not afford them the opportunity to obtain feedback on their writing - be it where they live, their work schedule, or finances.  We feel that all authors deserve the opportunity to have their work reviewed. Unlike most of
the current workshop opportunities - MFA programs, Low-Residency programs, colonies, online classes, etc. - the DCWS is unique in that it allows the writer to determine the parameters for their own review sessions.  With the DCWS, you sign up for what you want and need, not
some pre-determined program.  

The DCWS is set up to provide a one-to-one working relationship with a published author, allowing you the benefits of their experience, in many cases both writing and teaching.  Nearly 100 great authors have already agreed to volunteer
their services as mentors in our DCWS program.  The names you'll find in our database include award winning authors and teachers such as: George Singleton, Myfanwy Collins, Dawn Raffel, Peter Markus, Leora Skolkin-Smith, Katrina Denza, Laura van den Berg, Kevin Wilson, Nancy
Cherry, Jeff Parker and Mike Czyzniejewski. From this list, writers paying to participate in the DCWS may select an available author to work with. Participating writers will then have their work critiqued and can discuss in detail their writing and any other areas of writing
in general they wish to explore with their DCWS author.  

The DCWS will utilize email to reduce the difficulties writers such as yourself have when looking to find feedback on your work. Our workshops  remove the limitations of both time and distance as you'll
send your work and questions to your mentor when and where you have access to the internet.  Each participant will determine how many hours of mentoring they need, as well as how to progress - you asking specific questions about your work, or you asking for your manuscript
to be edited (10 pages per hour), or simply looking for a back and forth conversation about your work after the mentor you select has read the work.  

The program is being offered at an extremely low rate - many of the instructing authors volunteering their time to Dzanc do similar work as freelancers and charge much greater rates than are being offered here through the DCWS.  Other workshops and writing programs charge a lump sum of several hundred dollars up front.  Not only does the DCWS allow you to control and target your expenses, but 100% of the money brought in by Dzanc by our DCWS goes to supporting the writing programs we run for students grades 4-12. These additional programs - currently being run nationally by Dzanc - are offered free of charge to students who would not otherwise be able to afford and
experience these sort of writing programs.

The DCWS sessions are set up in hourly blocks and can be ordered as follows:

1 hour   - $20
2 hours - $30
4 hours - $50

The DCWS eliminates your need to travel to a university.  It also
eliminates your need to lay out a few hundred dollars up front for an 8 or 10 week online course.  It allows you to jump in and out when you are available, and also allows you to select from the list of authors that have generously volunteered their time to this project.  A full list is available at our website. 
This list includes published novelists, short story writers, flash fiction writers, poets and non-fiction writers. If you don't feel the need to select a specific author, we'll simply assign a writer to you.  

For more information on our Creative Writing Sessions program, please send an email to info@dzancbooks.org.

In order to sign up now, head over to visiting the DCWS page at our website http://www.dzancbooks.org/creative.html and select your author.  After deciding how many hours to work with your mentor, click on the Paypal button that corresponds to that number, and fill in the mentor name in the appropriate field and we'll get you started.  

I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT

SAM PINK

PAPER HERO PRESS

168 PGS.

ORDERING INFO HERE:

http://paperheropress.blogspot.com/2008/08/i-am-going-to-clone-myself-then-kill.html

Blake Butler (editor of Lamination Colony and No Colony. Author of EVER from Calamari Press):

"Sam Pink exists in all things. Sam Pink's tremor is threaded through the dark sections of scenes in the first Back to the Future, the sections we generally think of as 'night.' Sam Pink gored his way to the center of the child Russell Edson and ate all the beautiful / smart / wicked / fucked / riotous / smarmy / unconditional parts about him, then went to incubate and redouble. Sam Pink absorbed the passing souls of Andy Kaufman, Anton LaVey, Klaus Kinski and Shel Silverstein and fried them in his mother's blood. When Sam Pink emerged he wasn't crying, but everyone in the hospital was, tears of whiskey, liquid gold and smegma, and within seconds of his first breath, all our Bibles were ripped in half, prefiguring this book here, this tumor, this thing that should not have a name. It is no exaggeration to say now, with a mouth full of blood, that Sam Pink is dire, is hilarious, is chewing up our future."

Sam Pink's neighbor:

"Look, I did what you said. I bought your shitty book. Now stop trying to light my dog on fire."

THE NATIONAL VIRGINITY PLEDGE

BARRY GRAHAM

ANOTHER SKY PRESS

100 PGS.

ORDER NOW
http://www.anothersky.org/in-print/the-national-virginity-pledge-barry-graham/

“Barry Graham’s heroes want to love, yet bigger than their love for people and things is their capacity to destroy the objects of their affection. He doesn’t scorn them, though; he treats them with care and a loving tenderness. He turns grief, betrayal, and violence into something close to poetry, and finds beauty in places we should never wish to visit.”
–Stefan Kiesbye, Next Door Lived a Girl

“Barry Graham’s stories are little cries for help from way in the corners and deep in the cracks of contemporary fiction.”
–Jeff Parker, Ovenman

“Barry Graham’s writing hits hard because it is raw and honest. He will suck you in with equal parts everydayness and voyeurism.”
–Aaron Burch, Hobart

“…it remains a funny, reckless, fast paced, and edgy voice from beginning to end.”
–Dan Wickett, Emerging Writers Network / Dzanc